The last holiday trip my husband and I took together was in 1993. In 1994 I was pregnant with Joseph, in 1995 he was born, and by 1996 we realized he had problems that needed medical help .. a lot of medical help from doctors and later, from caregivers at home.
When we found someone who could stay at home with Joseph and the pets, we started going away for a night a year in the nearby New England town where we began our honeymoon. Because we married shortly before Christmas, we began to go around the time of our anniversary. The area merchants love us because we do almost all of our holiday shopping there.
One year we learned Old Sturbridge Village, the living history museum where it is always 1840, was having a night of special events: houses decorated for Christmas as they would have been (which, for many homes, was not at all), chestnuts roasted on an open fire (they are delicious), walks on familiar paths lit not by sunlight but by lanterns on top of snow, small concerts and sing-alongs in the meetinghouse.
We booked a room in the inn and we enjoyed an almost magical night, cold but not bitter, snow that was white and gleamed in the lantern-light, and Christmas carols sung in a simple white meetinghouse where the heat was from the crowd of visitors, not central heating.
The evening ended with dinner at the tavern on the green. As we sat at a table near the large, open hearth fireplace, my husband looked around and said a simple thing: “We have come here for over 20 years. What if you had had that tradition all of your life, coming first as a child and then as an adult with your parents? What would you talk about with your father?”
My father’s family came to Boston in 1630, when the city was founded. They were farmers in Watertown, on the opposite side of the Charles River, until the late 19th century. The last family home stood until after my great-aunt Rose’s death in 1978. I am born of rock, and wood, and water, of bedtime stories that turned out to be history, told by a father who went to war at age 17 and came home to become a history teacher… to try to help build a better future, one where we do not repeat the horrors of the past because we forget.
My husband was raising this nostalgia-filled idea several years after my father died, the first of our parents to go where we could not follow. I played along, and said we would sit by the fire because Dad loved them, and we would remember old times, current pleasures, what we hoped to do next year….
And what, Jeff said, if your Dad died, you came the next year anyway, and you found him here, sitting by the fire waiting for you at the end of the evening?
I thought on it and said I would tell Dad I missed him and we would chat about what had happened in the past year, I would ask him questions about events or world figures I didn’t know or had forgotten, and we would enjoy our time together. When I had to leave, I would probably ask if I would see him next year … embarrassed to ask a dead person if we could set a date for a reunion but needing to know the answer. And, Jeff said, he would tell you that he would be by the fire every year you came.
One year, I would know that I would not be coming to the Village next year, I would be wherever he was. Age or illness would be calling my name. I would not be afraid, I said to Jeff, because I had seen a glimpse of where I was going, who would be there. I would tell my father I did not need to be afraid, that I was thankful he was there for me all of my life. I would gently ask if he might come back next year, and he would say no. There was no longer a reason to come back.
And then, on the real evening this story spun out over a turkey dinner and dancing light from table candles, my husband shocked me. He said “What would be your last question to him?”
And without hesitation I replied “Why did you do this for me, Daddy?” And he would answer “Because I love you… and because I could.”
And I wept, am trying not to weep now in remembrance, because after years of bitterness at what life had dealt us, years of swinging between my childhood faith and bottomless doubts, I felt relief that night.
I sat at that table, unsure what had brought us to this point of revelation, and I knew that this was exactly what Jesus had done. He had come back to teach and comfort us.
Despite years of Bible study (beginning with my father) and church services and religious books, my faith boils down to that: God sent his son, Jesus lived as one of us, he died, and he came back ……. because he loved us and because he could.
Elizabeth Coolidge-Stolz, MD/ (c) healingwoman.net